The Asia Scotland Institute host a webinar with an expert panel on ‘Decoupling: A crisis of interdependence or the end of globalisation?’
The term “decoupling” has been used by many analysts to describe the lessening of political, investment, trade, innovation, and digital links between China and the West.
In the USA, the recent origins of decoupling can be traced to 2018, when President Trump imposed tariffs on solar panels and washing machines imported from China. Later that year China imposed duties of 178% on Sorghum imports from the USA. The US-China trade war escalated.
The growing restrictions on trade in certain goods has been continually worsened since then, by the Covid-19 pandemic from 2019, the war in Ukraine after the Russian invasion, and the heightened tensions around Taiwan.
What was at first a China-US issue is now becoming a global question of whether decoupling is a lessening of interdependence between trading nations or the end of globalisation. To discuss this question we have a panel of multidisciplinary experts.
Insitute Director, Martin Purbrick, has an article published in The Scotsman that explores ‘Worsening US-China relationship could have global impact‘.
Charles Mok is a visiting scholar at the Global Digital Policy Incubator of the Cyber Policy Center at Stanford University. He served as an elected member of the Legislative Council in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, representing the Information Technology functional constituency, from 2012 to 2020, and prior to that formed one of the earliest Internet service providers in Hong Kong in the 1990s.
Jacob Gunter is a Senior Analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), prior to which he served with the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China. Jacob has written extensively about investment and economic issues in China, including contributing to the major report “Decoupling: Severed Ties and Patchwork Globalisation”, released by the European Chamber in partnership with MERICS.
Dr. Chun-yi Lee is Director of the Taiwan Studies Program at the University of Nottingham, prior to which she had roles at the University of Duisburg, Germany, and Leiden University, the Netherlands. Dr. Lee has written extensively about China and Taiwan and related issues affecting the global economy.
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